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Photos of a supposed iPad 2 touchscreen are making the rounds today, courtesy of a repair shop with parts suppliers in China. They are not Retina Displays, in line with recent reports, but are apparently thinner 1024 x 768 IPS screens. Meanwhile, an industry research firm claims to have uncovered evidence that Apple intends to corner the market on advanced LCD displays.

The rumor mill pushed the idea that the iPad 2 would have a Retina Display, a story fed by discoveries of higher resolution graphics in the iBooks app. However, that rumor collapsed under its own weight, as LCD screens high-resolution enough to be called Retina Displays would be too expensive and require too much graphics horsepower to be reasonable for a tablet. Instead, Apple was said to be looking at a thinner, lighter screen for the new device.

A replacement screen that 9to5Mac got from iFixYouri - an iDevice repair shop in Florida and Somerville, Mass. - is apparently an LG Phillips 9.7-inch XGA 1024 x 768 high-aperture-ratio IPS display. It's about a millimeter thinner than current displays and is said to be "significantly lighter." It also has a thinner surrounding frame, which would support the rumors about a tapered design that have been suggested by leaked iPad 2 cases coming out of Asia.

Many observers believe Apple is looking to the third- or fourth-generation iPad to have true Retina Displays. And a report from market research firm iSuppli indicates that Apple is spending billions of dollars to lock in its supplies of high-resolution screens from LG Display, Sharp Corp. and Toshiba Mobile Display. The analysis by iSuppli suggests that Apple wants to corner the market in advanced in-plane switching (IPS) and low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS) technology. With Samsung's active matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) displays going mostly into its own products, this may mean that very few other manufacturers will have access to high-resolution displays.